Friday, March 21, 2008

I never studied Geek in school therefore I don't understand it when it is spoken. I wish I did but my language is Streetaleese, so forgive this basic approach.

What is Raw and why is it good for me??

First, digital sees in black and white, like your meter sees. It measures the given differences of shades of gray from 0-255 ( look at your histogram). 100 is sort of middle ground or mid gray kinda of like the old zone system of 0-10 with 5 being mid point and somewhere between 5-6 the old graycard, most skin tones.

Digital cameras have in a way their own programs to assign their given color to the pixels measured and in combination make up the many shades and tones of the color spectrum. It knows that if a given measurement is this then it must be this shade of green etc.

Raw is what the camera has metered and captured...jpegs and anything else is how it interprets that capture into its idea of color.

In Streetleese, Raw is the musical score and the rest is the performance you ear from the orchestra you are listening to. With just the score, you can play it any way or in any translated tempo or with another instrument if you like, and not affect the original score, in case you would like to play it differently later on. With the performance, you chime in with your Oboe or flute and try to change the tempo or a different note, but might risk throwing the piano off beat for a while and once the performance is done unless you record it on something else, it is out there...done.

Raw take up more space,not more time with the right workflow and programs however you come to it. No one shoots that perfect and if you do you shouldn't be reading this anyway.

With Raw, like a musical score, you can translate and re-translate it any way and in any form ,jpeg,tiff,DNG whatever you like and still have the original untouched and ready for the next performance.